Sunday, 29 December 2013

Photo Fit

I visited ‘Photorealism: 50 Years of Hyper-Realistic
Painting’, at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery’s Gas Hall just over a week ago,
in between the Christmas shopping. It’s the
first major large-scale retrospective in Europe devoted to this art ‘movement’
and features celebrated artists such as Birmingham-born John Salt and Chuck
Close, in what is being seen as a ‘real coup’ for the city. Surveying the work
of the major US artists considered to have developed the style, the exhibition
includes the large-scale hyper-realistic paintings of American life with which
Photorealism became famous.

John Baeder, 'Prout's Diner', 1974, oil on canvas, 76 x 122cms

It is with some trepidation that I bought my ticket, not
being overly interested in photorealism, as, like a lot of painters, you can be
left wondering ‘what is the point?, other than showing off your fancy-pants
skills at being able to brilliantly copy from a photograph. Many of my students
can copy from photographs really well too, and I spend quite a long time
persuading them not to, showing them different examples of drawing and
painting. But as so much painting over the centuries has been about exactly the
same, and I’ve still really enjoyed it (I’m thinking of Dutch Seventeenth
Century Still Life Painting, for example, and the way lenses were used by
painters long before the invention of the photograph to ‘project’ an image onto
the canvas, in much the same way John Salt makes his wrecked car paintings
today). Once inside though, I was hooked straight away by the images of the
bland, Middle American landscape, by artists such as Robert Bechtle and John
Baeder, whose paintings, the former’s work possessing an almost David Lynch
like quality, and the latter’s nostalgic obsession with the American diner, I
particularly enjoyed.

Robert Bechtle, 'Alameda Chrysler', 1981, oil on canvas, 122 x 175cms

There was something about their deadpan, often frontal,
compositions, with the geometry of the buildings and roads that chimed with me,
as well as the unglamourous settings of the worn-out diners, the banality of
the advertising placards, the tired, parked cars and rusty trucks. Despite the
seeming banality, they seemed to have much more individual character as places
than the modern Western urban landscape of America and Europe today, where
everything looks the same in our ‘out of towns’: same type of architecture and
planning; same branded shops and restaurant chains, whether you are in Widnes
or Albuquerque.I have liked Ralph
Going’s diner still lives for a long time, and have been influenced by their
subject matter in my own still life paintings, so it was nice to see an example
of one of these: a large painting of sugar shakers and bottles of ketchup and
mustard etc. They were very reminiscent really of the attention to detail and
realism of the earlier Dutch painters I’ve mentioned, and in all the work of
these earlier artists, I wasn’t really thinking about the use of photographs,
they seemed more like good, realistic paintings and not as slick as
anticipated, it was these other qualities of the subjects and the unusual
compositions, I was really attracted to. I could however, see what an affront
that would have been to the other art being made in the late 1960’s and 1970’s,
when they first appeared, and how shocking they would have been to seemingly
more sophisticated, art-world sensibilities, which also appealed to me. (In the
landscape mentioned, I was also reminded of George Shaw’s paintings of
Coventry’s Tile Hill).

Ralph Goings

Moving through the exhibition, some things struck me as just
being plain weird, such as the horse and cowboy paintings of Richard Maclean,
which you could never really say had any real sense of reality about them.I loved the paintings of empty interiors by
Jack Mendenhall, which were apparently copied from interior décor magazines in
the 70’s. There was something in their framing, sterility, and their
inoccupation that was very unsettling and gave them a psychological charge that
reminded me of Rick Moody’s/Ang Lee’s ‘The Ice Storm’. I also really enjoyed
the gaudy, over-sized still life paintings of children’s old-fashioned toys and
pinball machines by Don Jacot. I also loved randy Dudley’s industrial
landscapes. But then, when it came to representations of figure my interest in the
exhibition started to wane rapidly.There some awful paintings of the nude and some portraits of pretty,
filigree-like girls by the lake or in the woods, like some slightly
inappropriate middle-aged male fantasy. The Chuck Close paintings were terribly
out of place amongst this too, largely because they are so much tougher
conceptually, but also are about ‘process’ and the materiality. Close also famously
hates being associated with Photorealism, and the paintings here had little to
do with anything else on display, nakedly displaying the grid, which supports
his experiments in constructing the portrait.

The exhibition then lead to
more recent cityscape and architectural paintings of famous cities such as
Venice, Paris and Las Vegas, which just seemed devoid of any of that
psychological charge and conviction I had enjoyed in the earlier work. David
Parrish also echoed this in his countless, fetishist paintings of shiny
motorbikes and cars. I was finally left wondering ‘what is the point?’ other
than the technical display. It had all suddenly seemed to appear so empty. Next
to the motorbikes, were two far greater paintings of wrecked cars by Birmingham
born John Salt, whose work seemed so much stronger, with its coherent urban
grit.

David Parrish, 'Butler Terrace', 1973, oil on canvas, 138 x 138cms

I left the exhibition
dismayed by all the later stuff I’ve mentioned, and the exhibition definitely
seemed like a show of two halves. And yet in writing this I realise how much I
had enjoyed the earlier generations of artists and the images represented.
There were many connections to be made with my own interests, especially in
terms of the subject matter, that I hope to explore further, and maybe visit
the exhibition again in the coming weeks.